Oh and the viral news of the lake’s toxicity… has made the spot even more popular.

WHY ITS HOT?

We’ve heard stories about people falling off cliffs or dying in freak selfie accidents. This shows the way the world will bend to create the social media illusion of a curated life…. even if that pristine selfie is full of WW2 mining chemicals.

72% of Germans travel abroad for their holidays. With that knowledge, German Rail set out to encourage Germans to vacation in their home country by focusing on price and picturesque German locations that mirror famous foreign tourist destinations.

German Rail targeted travel enthusiasts interested in specific destinations on Instagram and Facebook. Then, through geo-tagging technology and Google Search, the audience was served video ads updated with real-time prices, comparing two gorgeous locations (one in Germany and one abroad), detailing the cost of travel from their closest airport to the foreign country and carbon emissions created by travel.

Why it’s hot:

Brands talk about using data all the time but we don’t always see it done in a smart, multi-dimensional way. German Rail successfully tapped into the insight that the record of the holiday (on Instagram & Facebook) is just important as the holiday itself and leveraged real-time user data to influence behavior of the German traveler.

Okay. It’s one thing to look to social media influencers for inspiration on a new handbag, sneakers, foundation, hotel stay… What about medication? Surgery? Having advanced in the highly regulated world of medical advertising and come to terms with how to remain compliant with guidelines, pharma is solidly in a new phase of advanced advertising. Yes, many other industries have been using influencers on social for years but pharma is often hesitant. No longer (for some).

Pharma influencers are paid an ~$1,000 per 100,000 followers. There’s deep pockets in this industry so they’re not just using one or two, they’re using a fleet of influencers to sell a lifestyle. That’s not a stretch either. If you think about the TV ads, they’re not selling psoriasis treatment, they’re selling the freedom to walk with naked legs and arms holding hands with your love interest before you take a dip in the pool. So instead of print, a 60 sec spot, or radio ad, pharma gets the pseudo storytelling candor benefits of influencers’ social feeds.

Oh, can’t end without an obligatory mention that the Karshians are, at least, partially to blame.

A post shared by CARDIVENOM (@iamcardib) on Jan 16, 2019 at 2:41pm PST

United States Senator from Hawaii Brian Schatz and Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut, debated retweeting her video. With an eager reply from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (or one of his staff members…)

From AOC cooking mac and cheese and shooting IG stories of her freshman year in congress, to Liz Warren cracking beers on Instagram Live, pols are looking for ways to connect and be more human using social media. More progressive ideas are becoming popular because the language is more accessible.

Anyone who’s on Instagram has undoubtedly come across a photo and wondered – “where is that, and how do I get there”? Probably on a daily basis. Thanks to easyJet’s new app feature, now you can find out, and book a flight there in a couple of taps.

According to the company – “Simply take a screenshot of a European destination you like the look of and upload it to Look&Book in our app. We’ll then tell you where it is and which flights will get you there.”

Why it’s hot:

While it’s a great example of turning a ubiquitous behavior into a simple utility, more importantly, it’s another signal that image recognition technology is about to become commonplace.

The newest addition to the growing list of features, the emoji slider.

““The emoji slider lets you ask more nuanced questions when you want to find out how your friends feel about something. By choosing an emoji for your question, you also add a layer of emotional context that helps those answering understand your tone and answer accordingly.”

Instagram is adding more tools to increase the usage of Instagram stories and steal share from Snapchat. At this point, it’s clear who is in the lead since IG has added several highly engaging features to the platform with more on the horizon.

How can brands use emoji sliders? To gain more information from their audience about their content and/or products services. This is 1:1 social listening on a grand scale with seamless and non-intrusive audience participation.

Why it’s hotter than a flame emoji:
This is a cool addition to the tool belt but it’s definitely not the last!
Instagram has also been testing in-app purchase features which would completely elevate the options available to marketers and users. IG is slowly making strides to be on par with WeChat, which has already infiltrated almost all aspects of a users life in the China market.

Instagram is testing a standalone app for private messages called Direct, a first step toward possibly toward removing messaging features from the core app.

Although it is officially only a test, Instagram’s rationale for building Direct app is that private messaging can never be a best-in-class experience when it lives inside an app meant for broadcasting publicly.

When Facebook split Messenger from the main app in 2014, it drew an outcry from users, who pelted it with one-star reviews. Today, the app has 1.3 billion monthly users — up from 500 million the year that it split.

Why It’s Hot
How many more messaging apps can there be? I guess time will tell but for now focused experiences continues to win even when it requires multiple apps.

Instagram, competing hot on the heels of other live video broadcasting apps, is enhancing its video streaming service with a new feature that it hopes will bring out more videos both from those of its 800 million users who might be too shy to use the feature on their own, and from those who can’t resist an opportunity to be more social. Today, Instagram announced that it would let users who run live video streams add guests into their videos.

The rollout, part of the company’s latest update, follows a limited test that Instagram started in August to smaller groups of users, as part of its bigger and gradual expansion of live video and messages — a feature that first launched a little under a year ago.

The feature works by letting people who are streaming a video to add anyone who is watching the video at that moment, by clicking on the “add” button in the corner of the screen. When a person gets added, he/she joins you in a separate window below yours on the screen. For now, it looks like you can only add one person in at a time (and you remove that person to add in another).

“Produce is war, and it is won by having something beautiful-looking to sell at Costco when the competition has only cat-faced uglies.” This lengthy New Yorker article recently dove into how Driscoll’s uses market insight and crop science to build their monopoly on the berry market.

“Driscoll’s focus groups have shown that millennials, adventurous and open-minded in their eating habits, and easily seduced by novelty, may embrace pale berries. With these consumers, unburdened by preconceived notions of what a white berry should look or taste like, Driscoll’s has a priceless opportunity: the definitional power that comes with first contact.”

“According to Frances Dillard, Driscoll’s global brand strategist and a veteran of Disney’s consumer-products division, berries are the produce category most associated with happiness. (Kale, in contrast, has a health-control, “me” focus.) On a slide that Dillard prepared, mapping psychographic associations with various fruits, strawberries floated between Freedom and Harmony, in a zone marked Extrovert, above a word cloud that read “Social, pleasure, joy, balance, conviviality, friendship, warmth, soft, natural, sharing.” (Blueberries vibed as status-oriented, demanding, and high-tech.) As I studied the slide over Dillard’s shoulder in her office, she smiled tightly and said, “This is proprietary.”

Why it’s hot: It’s pretty cool to learn how our favorite fruits came to be. I thought this was a cool case study in now market demand and consumer behavior drive product innovation and brand stories.

The photos you share online speak volumes. They can serve as a form of self-expression or a record of travel. They can reflect your style and your quirks. But they might convey even more than you realize: The photos you share may hold clues to your mental health, new research suggests.

From the colors and faces in their photos to the enhancements they make before posting them, Instagram users with a history of depression seem to present the world differently from their peers, according to the study, published this week in the journal EPJ Data Science.

“People in our sample who were depressed tended to post photos that, on a pixel-by-pixel basis, were bluer, darker and grayer on average than healthy people,” said Andrew Reece, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University and co-author of the study with Christopher Danforth, a professor at the University of Vermont.

The pair identified participants as “depressed” or “healthy” based on whether they reported having received a clinical diagnosis of depression in the past. They then used machine-learning tools to find patterns in the photos and to create a model predicting depression by the posts.

They found that depressed participants used fewer Instagram filters, those which allow users to digitally alter a photo’s brightness and coloring before it is posted. When these users did add a filter, they tended to choose “Inkwell,” which drains a photo of its color, making it black-and-white. The healthier users tended to prefer “Valencia,” which lightens a photo’s tint.

Depressed participants were more likely to post photos containing a face. But when healthier participants did post photos with faces, theirs tended to feature more of them, on average.

The researchers used software to analyze each photo’s hue, color saturation and brightness, as well as the number of faces it contained. They also collected information about the number of posts per user and the number of comments and likes on each post.

Though they warned that their findings may not apply to all Instagram users, Mr. Reece and Mr. Danforth argued that the results suggest that a similar machine-learning model could someday prove useful in conducting or augmenting mental health screenings.

“We reveal a great deal about our behavior with our activities,” Mr. Danforth said, “and we’re a lot more predictable than we’d like to think.”

The link between photos and health is an interesting one to explore. The role of new/alternate technologies (or just creative ways of using existing ones) in identifying illness — whether mental or otherwise — is something we are sure to see more of.

Think MailChimp just supports small business email marketing? Think again.

Based in Atlanta–far outside Silicon Valley’s bubble of venture-funded would-be unicorns–the company has 600-plus employees and did more than $400 million in revenue last year. More than 15 million customers sent 246 billion emails in 2016.

But the future of the company, CEO Ben Chestnut says, is “to take MailChimp magic we give to email, and sprinkle it on other marketing channels.”

A year ago, MailChimp introduced a recommendation engine–akin to the ones devised by big companies such as Amazon–that let its customers plunk product suggestions into the emails they sent their customers. In January of this year, it began helping small businesses buy Facebook ads.

Now MailChimp’s Instagram ad-buying feature aims to simplify the process of purchasing ads.

MailChimp’s strategy with these new ad-buying services and other functionality it’s recently added isn’t to give itself a new revenue stream. Instead, it’s offering them as part of its existing subscriptions at the same price as before. As with its freemium model, the company is betting that the more essential it can make itself to the way small businesses operate, the easier it will be to get large numbers of them to pay on an ongoing basis.

Why It’s Hot
While most companies aim to leave their roots behind and move on to bigger and better customers, MailChimp is staying firmly committed to small businesses and providing them easy yet robust marketing support at a price most can afford.

Today, Instagram rolls out a new feature that will now tell you who’s getting paid to post. I.e. You see your favorite Instagram model is going to a music festival in the Bahamas, and the post itself will have a call out to the sponsorship.

WHY IT’S HOT:

In addition to contributing to the suite of ad products Instagram currently provides to advertisers, this feature will explicitly note partnerships, sponsorships and paid product placement– and will hopefully mark the beginning of the end of the #ad hashtag. influencer marketing tends to be covert and transparency has at times been an issue. But instead of trying to fool consumers, Insta is leaning into its place as the natural outlet for bloggers and brands alike to reach their audience.

By now you have heard about the fiasco that was Fyre Festival. The social media-fueled project, co-founded by rapper Ja Rule and his tech entrepreneur partner Billy McFarland, promised people “two transformative weekends” on a private island in the Bahamas, with “the best in food, art, music, and adventure,” and, if the model-filled promo videos were any indication, this would be a tropical Coachella. This festival emerged seemingly out of nowhere but soon went viral after the festival organizers hired some 400 Instagram influencers to post about the event. The campaign promised luxury, beauty, and exclusivity.

This festival never happened, and the lead up to it was a fiasco. People remained stranded in Miami and the Bahamas on their way to the festival, which organizers announced at eight A.M. last Friday morning had been “postponed.”

The first warning sign came from Blink-182’s cancellation – the band backed out on Thursday afternoon, just 24 hours before the festival was set to begin, saying “We’re not confident that we would have what we need to give you the quality of performances we always give our fans.“ Then came reports of flight issues, with many attendees stuck on tarmacs in Miami. Those who actually got to the island found half-built tents (which end were actually storm relief tents), mattresses stacked around the tents, luggage dropped from shipping containers, a Sandals resort around the corner, less-than-ideal weather, and these sad sandwiches.

Festival goers now demand refunds, there is even a $100 million dollar lawsuit facing Ja Rule and Billy McFarland.

Why it’s NOT Hot:

What does this say about authenticity of influence marketing? Sure, many people blame “rich millennials” for falling for this mess of a festival, but is that fair? An editor at Wired writes “Fyre Festival was, in essence, the physical manifestation of the false narrative that social media creates. It’s the wide-shot on the smoothie bowl.” In my opinion, Fyre Festival and its rise and fall lessens the credibility of celebrity influencers – who have taken no accountability for promoting this, and collected their paycheck mindlessly.

When people think about 4/20, they’re probably not thinking of healthy activities, but cannabis health and wellness company, Hmbldt wants to change that—with the help of their products, of course.

The company’s product line consists of vape pens that are designed to distribute controlled hits of cannabis designed to help to alleviate common ailments such as pain and insomnia — without getting its consumers high.

Yesterday, the company rolled out “GO420,” a social effort that will highlight 420 healthy ways to enjoy April 20 via the hashtag #GO420. Gifs and videos offer tips like “Go make a dream come true,” “Go take a pottery class,” “Go tell your partner you love them,” “Go do push-ups in the park,” “Go tell your partner a sexy secret.”

Why It’s Hot

Putting the consumer first by leveraging what is likely their biggest moment and making it about personal health rather than buying a product.

Campaigns like this create excellent affinity and lifelong ambassadors for a brand.

It’s cold and flu season, and we all hate the sniffling, sneezing, and congestion that comes with it. What would make you feel better – walk into Starbucks and order from their Secret Menu – the Coldbuster, also known as “The Medicine Ball.” This tea drink combines a powerful punch of antioxidants that work as a cold remedy.
Starbucks took notice of all the photos posted on Instagram and just this week the company formally added the cult-favorite tea-based drink to its menu. It now has a standard recipe card and ring code, which helps create a more consistent experience for customers. Starbucks commented that the decision to add a new beverage would have taken weeks or months, but corporate was able to make it happen in one day.

The beverage is a Venti cup with a bag of Jade Citrus Mint Tea and a bag of Peach Tranquility Tea filled half with hot water and half steamed lemonade. It’s finished with a little honey and an pump of peppermint.

The Medicine Ball’s journey into the formal Starbucks system began when a store manager posted in the company’s internal messaging system that his baristas were making more than 20 of the drinks a day. Customers were coming in and requested it after seeing the drink posted on Instagram. The problem was the manager wasn’t sure if his team had the right recipe. The company decided to make the Medicine Ball an official beverage after nearly 40 other managers responded, saying they were selling anywhere from one to four dozen a day.
Why It’s Hot

Instagram has a lot to be excited about – There are now more than 1 million businesses that advertise monthly on its platform – a 400% increase year-over-year. Instagram’s global community now exceeds 600 million users. More than 8 million businesses have profile pages around the world. The impact of Instagram – In just the last month, more than 120 million users visited a business’s web site, retrieved directions, called, emailed or direct-messaged a business via its Instagram page. These are the metrics to win valued, engaged followers who care about your business. As Starbucks shows, their loyal followers on Instagram created enough conversation (and sales) that the Coldbuster was added to their menu.

Instagram is beginning to test new profiles for businesses, the first prototypes were shared a few days ago and have 3 key new features:

A “Contact” button, which means they’ll no longer have to put email addresses in their profile.

A linkable location tag- when users hit “Contact” it also opens up an option to get directions to the business. This feature gives businesses more room to describe their business in their 150 Instagram bio, rather than putting in their address.

Account categorization through tags which show up underneath their username. Again, this gives them more room to be authentic in their bio.

Why It’s Hot: This is a small step in Instagram becoming a big brand friendly platform like Facebook. Here’s to hoping analytics come with it too.

Nielsen conducted a study to quantify Instagram’s impact on music sales and found that Instagram users spend 42 percent on music, tickets, and merchandise compared to the U.S. population averages. Other stats revealed that Instagram users spent more hours listening to music than average for the U.S. and were also more likely to listen to pop. Interestingly, Instagram Music fans also were twice as likely to pay for streaming music. Find more cool stats around this key audience in the article!

Why It’s Hot: Brands with a target that index high in music or attending live events should look to Instagram as an effective channel to reach and engage with these consumers.

Instagram Spotlights is shining bright this week officially making their curated user-generated video that comes together to form one long piece of content a permanent feature on the platform. Much like Snapchat Stories, Instagram Spotlights’ content is being created on just about every topic including everything from cats to fitness.

Instagram’s goal and hope is that Spotlights will not only keep people engaged and coming back for more but that is will also be used as a new tool for users to discover new content. Much like Crimson Hexagon’s newer offering “Segments”, users will be able to discover content, brands and/or influencers in turn uniting platform users with content that previous may have gone unseen. According to Gabe Madway, Instagram’s communication manager:

“Spotlight is where you go to discover things you don’t follow but might end up following. Things you never expected to see.”

Most important for digital marketers to know is how Instagram selects the content the platform is going to curate within Spotlights. Hashtags are the foundation of curating Spotlight features so when creating content hashtags may play a more important role if your brand is looking to be “discovered” in Spotlights.

Why it’s Hot: The social playground is free for all to play. Even if Instagram Spotlights may be stepping on Snapchat Stories’ toes or taking a page from Twitter Moments’ playbook, all is fair in fan love and social engagement. It doesn’t matter who was in the sandbox first; all that matters is the one that builds the best castle.

Earlier this year Instagram made it possible for ad- and marketing tech providers to build tools that marketers can use to manage their brands’ Instagram accounts, find content to post to those accounts and buy ads on Instagram. More than 100 companies have built such tools, and Instagram has picked 40 companies to certify and join its new Instagram Partner Program.

“Now that that ecosystem is blossoming, we want to make it really easy for partners and the companies that are building these tools to get visibility,” said Jim Squires, director of market operations at Instagram. “And we want to make it easy for businesses and marketers that want to connect with partners to understand what each of the partners does.”

Instagram is certifying companies in three categories. The ad-tech category includes companies that make tools for brands to buy, plan and customize their ads for Instagram. The community management category includes companies that offer tools for brands to manage their Instagram accounts. And the content marketing category encompasses companies whose tools can be used by brands to find content to post to their Instagram accounts.

In addition to the attention boost, Instagram plans to provide certified vendors with training through Facebook’s Blueprint education program as well as resources around how to best use Instagram for business purposes.

There are no economic requirements for a company to gain entry into the partner program, Mr. Squires said. The only requirements are that a company proves its technology is proprietary, demonstrates market leadership, offers resources to marketers, has a successful track record and participates in training, according to an Instagram spokeswoman. While Instagram has picked an initial 40 companies to certify, other tech providers can apply for approval into the program.

Marketers will be able to visit a dedicated site to find out more about each of the companies in the Instagram Partner Program. The full list is also available below with companies sorted by category. Curalate, Percolate, Salesforce and Sprinklr are listed multiple times because they were approved in more than one category.

This will allow social teams all over to organize and launch Instagram campaigns in a much more efficient, thought out way. Also, for our company specifically, we already work with some of the approved vendors, so it will only broaden the opportunities for us to use our existing tools.

Today, the Facebook-owned company launched Boomerang, an iPhone and Android app that lets users make mini-social videos that endlessly loop.

As part of the photo-sharing app’s larger video push, Boomerang makes it possible to create videos that play forward and backward in either portrait or landscape mode that can then be shared on Instagram.

Instagram announced another standalong app to use with its platform today called, Boomerang. While it’s not groundbreaking, it illustrates the next standalone app added to the mix from Instagram which currently includes Hyperlapse and Layout.

The timing of this release is interesting as well since Facebook recently announced 7-second looping profile pictures. Simple to use, the app can enhance your creativity on the platform. Although it’s so simple to use, it can easily be forgotten. It will be interesting to see how it grows over the next few months and how brands will embrace the app to mirror consumer trends and actions.

It’s important to keep a pulse on the latest apps in the marketplace especially when a behometh like Facebook/Instagram launches one.

According to TechCrunch, “Instagram seems to be having better luck with its standalone app strategy than its parent company.” Unlike Facebook, “Instagram instead treats standalone apps as external creative tools that feed content directly back into the main app.”

This year, Instagram made a lot of changes and updates to compete with other social channels, particularly in the messaging sector. One update that the platform tweaked was their Direct Messaging feature that enabled fans to interact with brands on a more personal level.

See how DKNY is using Instagram Direct to engage with fans: “In an intiative conceived under the creative directors and DKNY’s first Chief Image Officer Hector Muelas, the brand will use Instagram’s newly updated messaging feature, Instagram Direct, to provide fans personalized content on how Mr. Osborne and Mr. Chow conceived those designs, ranging from explanatory videos to sketches to behind-the-scenes images.” – Ann-Christine Diaz

Fashion Week is the center of the fashion industry where people flock to the show to get an inside look into trends and work of the designers. To launch DKNY’s new collection, they decided to create personalized messages for fans engaging with them on social media. This was a very great way for the brand to show appreciation to their fans and it was a creative way to showcase their latest line on the ultimate creative platform.

Call it the “Instagram Effect”—that filtered, shadowed, sharpened, brightened, tilted, faded, structured, saturated way of seeing life through a lens. It’s changed the way people portray themselves and see others.

And it’s having the same impact on brands.

Design teams are beginning to see the benefit of moving away from over-lit, over-staged and generally over-edited photography for their campaigns and instead are favoring a more organic (albeit filtered) look and feel that matches the medium—on Instagram itself, obviously, but also in print and across an array of other media.

“We kind of call it ‘perfectly imperfect,'” said Nathan Iverson, evp and design director at Deutsch LA. “People will call you out pretty easily if your food looks overly propped or overly perfect because that’s not how it is.”

Iverson said Instagram certainly isn’t pioneering the use of effects, but it is resurrecting and evolving an old-school aesthetic. Making a photo retro or over-saturated or pushed and electric was done long before computers came along. The difference now is that analytics allow for real-time analysis of which visual styles appeal to viewers, blending art with marketing science.

Why it’s Hot:

Instagram’s influence on photography could add to the evolution of photography as people look to keep moments natural and first person view and move away from over-produced imagery.

Instagram will soon carry a lot more advertising. Direct-response buttons, an API for ad buying and Facebook-style targeting capabilities will give advertisers new ways to buy and will lead to rapid increases in ad spending on the photo-focused social network. eMarketer forecasts Instagram will have $595 million in ad revenue this year, rising to $2.81 billion in 2017.

These changes will likely result in their ad business growing rapidly the latter half of the year, as features will roll out over the next several months, and by the end of 2015 Instagram will have a full slate of ad products for advertisers large and small.

“We’ve spent the last 18 months establishing the platform for large brands. The next logical step is to empower businesses of all sizes to be able to achieve their objectives,” said Jim Squires, Instagram’s director of market operations.

Many companies will be eager to test the social network’s new features. Instagram advertising was previously a rare commodity, reserved for McDonald’s, L’Oréal, Mercedes-Benz and other brands that were willing to spend a flat rate of $200,000 to conduct a campaign. Instagram offered those advertisers a limited assortment of image ads, 15-second video ads, and the newest feature, carousel ads, which can display more than one image.

Now that Instagram is opening up to more advertisers, it’s likely to find a lot of pent-up demand.

“Instagram is probably [our] favorite platform right now in terms of pioneering and being willing to try new things,” said Roderick Strother, director of worldwide digital and social at Lenovo, whose Australian arm recently conducted its first Instagram ad campaign. “The importance of Instagram has grown tremendously for us.”

Why Its Hot:

Instagram has a lot of what marketers see as the most compelling package: audience plus strong engagement plus strong brand awareness. The new features seek to make a user-friendly success story into a marketer-friendly one as well, with the help of FB learnings.

The social network’s ad revenue is projected to increase rapidly, approaching $1.5 billion in 2016 and $3 billion in 2017. Instagram will account for 3.7% of parent company Facebook’s ad revenue this year.

In 2017, Instagram will have higher US net mobile display ad revenues than Google or Twitter.

Instagram advertisers will be able to use a full slate of Facebook targeting tools, including the popular Custom Audiences feature. That will be a key drawing card.

Instagram will set a high bar for direct-response ads, which will have a premium look. Ad load will remain low, which will likely increase prices. This combination will effectively shut out many performance advertisers seeking a low cost per click (CPC).

Users have shown high engagement with the branding ads that have appeared on Instagram thus far, but that could change as new types of advertisers enter. Appropriate use of targeting and creative will be necessary.

Instagram will launch ecommerce capabilities with the “shop now” and “install now” buttons, but the kinds of advertisers that will benefit most from them will be those with unusual, limited-quantity or eye-catching products. App installs may fare better—as long as the ads meet Instagram’s creative bar.

This week, I wanted to share a Whitepaper from one of our partners, EngageSciences, titled “6 Ways to Use Instagram for Brand Marketing.”

The whitepaper has many interesting facts around related to e-commerce and native advertising. For example, only 55% of prestige brands link from their websites to their Instagram profile, and even fewer (14%) feature Instagram photos on their own websites. When websites feature compelling content from Instagram, there is a 300% increase in “dwell time” on pages and an 11% increase in web traffic with sites that feature social content and interactive applications.

The most interesting metrics are related to UGC below.

Why It’s Hot

There is no denying the power of UGC for brands.The whitepaper concludes that authentic, yet persuasive Instagram photos within e-commerce experiences are key along with shoppable links and “buy now” CTAs will help brands to monetize UGC to not only increase engagement but impact sales as well.

With that said, some brands are understandably apprehensive of leveraging this content on websites or branded social channels. EngageSciences points out that there are steps that should be taken to ensure the brand is appropriately protected, including requesting rights and tracking all rights requests along with an audited history of approvals.

Instagram began tapping into the 70 million photos and videos posted daily to its service to put its 300 million users in the middle of current events. Instagram has reimagined its search feature to become more of a source for images and videos during breaking news events. The improved Search tool make it easier to find images related to any topic, and it will feature hand-selected collections, such as extreme athletes or deserted islands, to help users discover interesting material. The Search tool will also feature a section for trending places and hashtags. The updated Explore button, which will first appear in American versions of the app, will show users the most important photos from events and places in their regions and across the country, as determined by the service’s algorithms.

Why It’s Hot

Social sites want to become the go-to place for people to search and find images from community sources and citizen reporting — not just those taken by news agencies like Reuters or Bloomberg. The stream of photos and videos posted on Instagram, from celebrities as well as from ordinary people, can deliver a better you-are-there feeling, whether it’s a Houston flood or a Brooklyn blizzard. It’s allowing our community to connect to the world as it happens.” remarked Mr. Systrom, chief executive and co-founder of Instagram.

After an initial diagnosis, diabetes sufferers often experience a period of shock when they learn that everything has to change. Turkish mobile operator, Turkcell, and agency R/GA London have created an app to make adjusting to the necessary life changes much easier.

The app tracks a user’s condition via a photographic journal, using Instagram. By synching with a wireless reader that takes blood measurements, Selftrak is also able to map levels to an Instragram image, allowing medical professionals and friends to provide input and support. Alongside this, like everyone else in the world it seems, diabetics take snaps of their meals and post them, and again, these can be liked and helpful suggestions made.

The idea is to make using the app as simple as possible, helping people stay motivated, complying with treatment and keeping the lines of communication with medical staff open.So far, Selftrak has been tested in an 18-month long study with 200 diabetes patients at Istanbul University. The latest version, still in beta phase, is available on Google’s app store and a more limited iteration is currently available via Apple. Updates are planned in the coming months.

Instead of trying to persuade sufferers to adopt entirely new habits, tools and behaviors to monitor the condition, Selftrak deploys Instragram, a tool many people already use and taps into behaviors that people already have. And initial tests prove the app is making a difference — the results of the 18-month trial are highly encouraging. Treatment compliance increased by 54%. Blood sugar levels decreased by 27% and complication forecasts decreased by 37%.

Selfies, dogs, babies and food. The most common things that we see in our Instagram feed. Picking up on the popular user behavior of posting pictures of food to our social network, Google is rolling out a tool, Im2Calories, that is able to analyze food pics on Instagram and count the calories in them.

The way it works is if you upload a photo of a cheeseburger, Im2Calories could identify the pixels in the image as that of a burger, and calculate the calories based on its size relative to the plate and any additional condiments.

Some are not happy with the tool as they feel it is a “fat-shaming” tactic. Google defended itself by stating it is not a shaming tactic but instead provides an easier way for users to keep a food diary by taking the guesswork out of calorie count.

Why It’s Hot (or not)

When we see photos of food on Instagram it’s not usually every day boring meals. It’s more the amazing and decadent brunches and celebratory meals. In the most common instances, people aren’t using Instagram as a food diary to live a healthier life anyway and it seems like Google is trying to force this behavior. Also, it’s important to note that when a user posts a photo of that glorious burger, they may not use the tool themselves but now any one of their followers can apply the algorithm to their post and pass a judgment. It just doesn’t seem that a social media app is the best way to host this tool. Perhaps marketing this as a standalone app where people can voluntarily use it s they see fit on their own personal photos would be a better move.